Hotel Highlights

Overview

The bright, feminine rooms at this well-groomed Kensington hideaway are as refreshing and tasty as a cup of Earl Grey on a spring morning. Number Sixteen’s wonderful location – seconds from South Ken Tube station and the Old Brompton Road – makes this London boutique hotel a great base for shopping weekends or culture trips, or for tacking a little pleasure onto your business affairs.

Our favourite rooms

Every room is uniquely decorated with a different mix of Kit Kemp’s trademark flirty florals and savvy colour combinations; rooms feel spacious thanks to high ceilings and plenty of natural light – even those on the lower ground floor have big windows – and twin-sinked bathrooms are all similarly clad in soothing pale grey granite and oak. Room 17 is a Wedgewood-blue themed Luxury Double on the ground floor, with striped walls and vintage floral fabrics; French windows provide a pretty view across the courtyard garden from your bed (although you may wish to draw the curtains if there’s anyone sitting outside). Room 3 is a Deluxe Double on the lower ground floor facing Sumner Street, with an open fireplace and a neutral colour palette of grey, putty and bone that will appeal to pastel-hating Mr Smiths. A first-floor Deluxe Double dressed in pistachio and lilac candy stripes, Room 102 looks down onto the courtyard. A tailor’s dummy covered in the same jaunty fabric as the bedhead and a beautiful antique wardrobe give this room a fashion-lovers vibe.

Also

Smoking rooms are available, although there is no smoking anywhere else inside the property.

Children

Welcome, although this is a very grown-up playpen. Extra beds (£40 a night) and cots (free) can be added to most rooms; there’s no children’s menu, but the kitchen is very accommodating.

Food & Drink

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Hotel Restaurant

There isn’t a dedicated restaurant, but there is an extensive all-day room service menu that can be ordered in the lounge, library, conservatory or garden (or in your room, of course). Choose between luxe takes on British classics from fry-ups to afternoon tea and international favourites including spag bol, hoi sin duck wraps and burgers.

Hotel Bar

A large cupboard hides an extensive honesty bar of beers, wines , spirits, soft drinks and coffee – just help yourselves. There are well-stocked minibars in every room, too – with Miller Harris scented candles and Dormen snacks for cosy nights in.

Last orders

None – the full menu is available 24 hours a day, and a help-yourself honesty bar takes care of drinks in the small hours.

Room service

An extensive menu is available 24/7, anywhere you fancy from bedroom to drawing room – mi casa, tu casa.

Smith Insider

Dress code

Cashmere and collars for him; London’s ladies who lunch for her.

Top table

Overstuffed couch in the drawing room, so you can admire the quirky driftwood candelabra – some of the furnishings in here are more like installation pieces. In summer, choose one of the courtyard tables by the softly splashing stone fountain.

Local Guide

Worth getting out of bed for

Here in South Kensington, you're close to the Royal Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the wonderful V&A, as well as Kensington Palace and Hyde Park (where you can also visit the Serpentine Gallery). There's swanky shopping galore, too, with Knightsbridge and Kensington High Street nearby – so you can get Harrods ticked off your shopping-to-do list. It's only a short Tube ride into the centre of London, if you want to catch a show in the West End or explore Covent Garden's boutiques and markets.

Local restaurants

Chelsea’s hugely impressive Ambassade de L’Ile on Old Brompton Road (+44 (0)20 7373 7774) – the second outpost of masterful Michelin-starred French chef Jean-Cristophe Ansanay-Alex – is an appetite-encouraging 10-minute walk from Number Sixteen; if the exclusively-priced à la carte dinner menu is a deterrent, the set lunch menus (two courses, £25; three courses, £35) are good value. Other good options near the hotel include the bistros at The Pelham or The Gore; French restaurant Aubaine at 262 Brompton Road (+44 (0)20 7052 0100); and for excellent Iberian tapas, Casa Brindisa at 7–9 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2HQ (+44 (0)20 7590 0008). Sherry and ham take centre stage at Capote y Toros, at 157 Old Brompton Road (+44 (0)20 7373 0567). There’s a well-curated wine list and inventive small plates such as lamb sweetbreads and fresh garlic-infused artichokes mixed with mushrooms. Walls are lined with photos of bullfighters and candid family snaps.

Local bars

Have a few drinks before dining at Bluebird Restaurant and Bar on the King's Road (+44 (0)20 7559 1000).

Local cafés

It's probably a little bit insulting to call Tom's Kitchen on Cale Street (+44 (0)20 7349 0202) a café, but this bar and brasserie is a mighty fine place for a long, late weekend brunch or lunch. The Hummingbird Bakery and its tempting array of pastel-iced cupcakes and sweet delights is a one-minute walk from Number Sixteen on Old Brompton Road. Hang out there while Mr Smith gawps at Lamborghinis in the showroom on the corner.

Number Sixteen

16 Sumner Place, South Kensington, London, SW7 3EG, United Kingdom

Planes

London Heathrow is 15 miles from the hotel. Once you land, the Heathrow Express will take you as far as Paddington, from where you can get the Circle or the District lines to nearby Gloucester Road and South Kensington stations.

Trains

Victoria, Paddington and Waterloo stations are all less than a 10-minute taxi ride away. Between them, they'll take you pretty much anywhere you want to go in the UK. South Kensington (on the Piccadilly, Circle and District lines) is your nearest Tube station, less than a five-minute walk from the hotel.

Automobiles

Public parking is available on Sloane Avenue, or a valet will happily do the honours.

Reviews

Anonymous review

It was one of those days that tends to make Londoners excitable: a sunny one. As Mr Smith and I exited the tube at South Ken, I thought for a moment that we'd stumbled across a public audition for the next GAP advert. Seemingly every young, tanned, beautiful thing in London with the big lion hair only good genes can give you, were spilling out onto the terraces of this upmarket neighbourhood&rsquo…

Number Sixteen

Anonymous review by Ellie O'Mahoney, High-tailing hack

It was one of those days that tends to make Londoners excitable: a sunny one. As Mr Smith and I exited the tube at South Ken, I thought for a moment that we'd stumbled across a public audition for the next GAP advert. Seemingly every young, tanned, beautiful thing in London with the big lion hair only good genes can give you, were spilling out onto the terraces of this upmarket neighbourhood’s restaurants and bars, shrieking with laughter at each others' jokes. 'Oh stop it, Hugo, stop it!' they barked as we walked past. Thankfully, we were en route to a rather more quiet corner of SW7. Just three minutes' walk from the the beautiful and the not very damned, tucked away in a quiet Mary Poppins-esque side street between the Fulham Road and Old Brompton Road is Number Sixteen. Blink and you actually would miss it – we nearly did – as it's like all the other mid-Victorian white stucco terrace houses in Sumner Place, with just a discreet sign above its door to indicate that it isn't a private residence. Lucky us.

With 42 bedrooms, it's the smallest member of the Firmdale group, home to the Haymarket, Soho and Charlotte Street hotels. But it would be doing Number Sixteen an injustice to describe it as their little sister. For a start, it doesn't really feel like a hotel, more the home of a flamboyant, and rather wealthy Great Aunt who brings back wood-carved treasures from her travels to the Tropics to sit alongside her forward-thinking Starburst colour furnishings. Co-owner Kit Kemp's trademark humbug colours of lime green and hot pink are definitely in evidence here in the great big marshmallow sofas of the drawing room, but the Lion King-like wood carvings, teamed with khaki drapes in the conservatory help mark it out as something a little different to its bedfellow behemoths. Number Sixteen's real pull is its courtyard garden, particularly for us on an evening so hot it felt as if London had been momentarily placed into a terracotta pizza oven.

First, which London hotels have any kind of grounds at all? Ask yourself that. And secondly, not only does this hotel have one, but it has a rather lovely one at that. It's the kind a Parisian would have, if there were any room in Paris. It's leafy and is divided into little Tuilleries-type sections, where you can get some private tête-à-tête time over an early evening G&T and under the trees, which we did, sitting on the delicate white wrought-iron chairs listening to the babbling stone fountain.

When we Googled restaurants before arrival, Gloucester Road's L'Etranger popped up as being a pleasant hop, skip and 'marvel at all these Porsches' 15-minute walk away. If you're going to do South Ken, you have to go the whole hog and L'Etranger is the whole hog with foie gras on the top. No, really, we ate that. Inside the restaurant it's as if the Eighties never turned into the Nineties turned into the Noughties. It's all streamlined grey, black and white leather and £400 tasting menus featuring reindeer. I was half-expecting to see Patrick Bateman and a blonde at a corner table. But we didn't, instead we sat gawping at the slick-haired, no socks, brogue-wearing brigade that voted this the Which? Good Food Guide's London restaurant of 2009. The silky-mannered restaurant manager looked no older than the cast of High School Musical but was charm in a suit, floating around the place delivering caramelised black cod with miso and tuna tartare with sevruga caviar to the cream of Kensington.

Sated, we made our way back through the balmy Kensington nightlife and kicked back in the high-ceilinged library, which, with its driftwood candelabra and insect-inspired art, makes one feel as if one has stumbled across an upmarket art gallery. As the hottest night of the year approached boiling point, we were thankful for the breeze through the floor-to-ceiling French windows and even more grateful for the help-yourself honesty bar – a walk-in cupboard treasure trove, that stocks beers, wines, spirits, soft drinks and coffee. Mr Smith is a biddable chap and served himself an Amaretto before cramming he and me into the teeny tiny lift and up to our bedroom, number 206.

Ours wasn't the largest of suites but it was, truly, perfectly proportioned, with enormous sash windows that looked down onto Sumner Place, a calming satin blue and cream colour scheme and a ship of a bed, complete with Frette bed linen, and the prettiest white embroidered quilt.

Our bathroom was a lesson in clever use of space, a twin sink job, clad in sophisticated grey marble and oak with Miller Harris toiletries to complete the ablution package. Indeed, if there wasn't so much to do outside – the Natural History Museum, V&A and Science Museum are two minutes' walk – this would make a gorgeous setting for a cosy night in: a DVD library and a beast of a minibar: Dormen's snacks of spicy peanuts and Belgian chocolate-coated raisins, Fiji water (is this allowed anymore? It does have a pretty bottle...) and Miller Harris candles. As we cuddled up under the Frette, Mr Smith remarked that, 'hotel rooms make everything feel right in the world'. Too true of this one, darling. For the purposes of this argument, though, let's ignore we ever stayed in that place off the M1 with the dirty sheets.

The next morning, the sun was shining so we took breakfast in the garden next to a family of excited Americans who we found wandering about the jardin taking photos of the exotic flowers and exclaiming, in between mouthfuls of sausage and bacon, 'This place is gorgeous, it's just gorrrrgeous!' But here even over-excited fellow guests are a pleasure, and as the Yanks, Mr Smith and I settled down to our breakfasts – a spectacular eggs florentine and The Times for me and a fry-up and The Telegraph for him – I couldn't help agree with my young man (for one night only, at least), Number Sixteen had made everything just right.

The Guestbook

Whenever you book a stay at a Smith hotel with us, we'll invite you to review it when you get back. Read what other Smith members had to say in Number Sixteen's Guestbook below.

Judith

GoldSmith

Stayed on
4 Feb 2015

We loved

I have now stayed here half a dozen times and I come back to it when I want to settle into a chic London neighborhood without the fast crowd in competition. This is a place for grown ups who like a civilised London hotel that's impeccably kept, beautifully realised but on the quiet side of the street. I love the feeling of staying in a house that it gives you, the residential streets, its prime access to South Ken tube station ( with access to the District, Circle and Piccadilly lines so brilliant for getting to meetings, dinner almost anywhere and key shopping areas - in fact this is one of its critical success factors for me overall). I like the fact that they remember me and greet me by name when I walk in the door, I like the fact that its got the trademark Firmdale feel and accoutrements - great bathrooms, Kit Kemp fitout, beautiful bed linens, good sitting rooms - but it's a little bit less expensive than the newer hotels in the group. Great value, great experience.

Don’t expect

There's not much that can be done about it but the rooms are small - ish - great for one person but can cramped for two people travelling. Having said that the bathrooms are fantastically well fitted out and relatively spacious - which is a huge plus.

Rating:
9/10 stars

Marion de

BlackSmith

Stayed on
30 Apr 2014

We loved

I liked the size of the hotel and the personalised attention. The proximity to the tube station was really nice.

Rating:
9/10 stars

Rahel

BlackSmith

Stayed on
7 Feb 2014

We loved

My room: I loved it. Also the staff was very friendly. I felt very comfortable in the hotel, and when I come back to London with a friend in a month or two, I will definitely book Number 16 again.

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